How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Rockmelt

I remember hearing about Rockmelt, a browser that combines your browser with your social networks, not too long ago, and thinking, “Man, that’s so stupid.” Why on earth would I want to combine my browser with my social networks? Who wants to be that connected? As it turns out, I really enjoy such a thing.

I’m already really hooked into Twitter, but I’ve been wanting to start to do more with the TFIB Facebook page. I decided to ask around Saturday night to see if anyone had made a Facebook app that worked similar to Twitter for Mac, but there weren’t really any great options. But TFIB reader Alejandro Martinez suggested I try out Rockmelt, which I hadn’t thought about in quite a while. I’ve been using it for about 36 hours and I’m totally obsessed now, and here’s why.

First off, it’s built on top of Chrome, which is my preferred browser. It’s faster than Safari or Firefox, it’s got some super helpful extensions and I love it’s cleanliness overall. Add onto it the Rockmelt components (as you can see above) and you start getting some really useful tools. I now have immediate access and notifications to Twitter and my Facebook as well as Gmail. The notifications are small and not noisy, so even though I check them immediately, they don’t really bother me. There’s also a great View Later function which lets me easily bookmark items from the address bar (it’s the tiny clock icon).

If you run a blog or a website or are into social media, this is a really flexible and valuable tool, and like any other tool, it’s all in how you use. This might not be for everyone, but for me personally this is changing the way I work. I’m also sure there are a lot of other features that I’m missing, but these are what I’ve found and enjoyed so far.

Are there any other good tips I should know about?

Bobby

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WRITTEN BY

Bobby Solomon

The founder and Editor-In-Chief of The Fox Is Black. He currently lives in Los Angeles where he works as a creative director pertaining to websites, apps, and other beautiful things. Eat, drink, design.

Ignoring the notifications can be difficult, but that’s sort of the point, that you’re always alerted. There is an option in the browser to turn off the notification counts, so if they’re too distracting they can disappear. The browser also has a “quiet mode” which allows you to hide everything.

Personally, I got rid of the Facebook chat, that’s a bit too much for me.